# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S199
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It, etc. 199

...organism complete in itself. This is what stands eternally fast and what determines and bears all development of the Church; it alone can also judge concerning any gifts of grace whatsoever and their purpose and goal, above all those of prophecy or of the revelation and interpretation of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, which cannot be tested according to one's own faith, since that faith is often and for the most part without them and stands in no necessary connection with them at all, because such a rule, for the sake of the weakness of our flesh, will be only an imperfect one. In the pattern of sound doctrine we have the foundation upon which the building of the body of Jesus Christ has been raised, and through the confession of the saints concerning that pattern we have at the same time the sense which their faith always joined to the Word and expressed, as often as it was a question of setting the individual member or article in its true light against every distortion. They hang together in so wonderful a unity that the dissolution of one part draws the whole after it, and they are the sum of all truth unto salvation, eternal and unchangeable. Whether a piece or part of the whole body of churchly dogmatic material is a fundamental article, such that it cannot be violated without an assault upon the foundation, has this for its infallible sign: whoever can motivate his contradiction of it only by mixing in as principles either human reason and caprice — according to which the definite content of faith set down in the Scriptures and laid down in the Symbols is more or less passed over — or a tradition that is not meant to supplement and enliven the written Word, thereby proves that he has abandoned the foundation. The further the descent into error goes, the more do human contrivances or wavering feelings take the place of divinely positive knowledge; hence a vigorous seed of error can often lie hidden, on account of its source, in the apparently slightest deviation, while conversely the unsuitableness of many a manner of expression flows from a lack of knowledge which is soon dispelled by the light of the Word. It is persistence in spite of every better conviction of the contrary that makes a man a heretic. Whatever intervenes deeply and decisively in the whole presentation of doctrine works back in like manner upon faith and upon spiritual, churchly life; Yes and No cannot stand side by side; every article of the apostolic deposit entrusted to us is a tree of life which brings forth its fine fruits, which have the character of faith about them and are hallowed by it. May the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all comfort, grace, and mercy, preserve us from every union which is not an edification of the body of Christ and a communion of saints upon the indivisible foundation of doctrine — from every union that sets a subjective opining and imagining in the place of the rule of truth and, in a falsely teleological striving, contradicts the elements of that rule!